Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 170

Macron’s Opening Bid with Europe

Despite an initial burst of rabid enthusiasm among EU supporters in response to the election of Emmanuel Macron, it is becoming increasingly clear to some that the new French President, bolstered by his party’s recent parliamentary triumph, will… well, act like a French President. Politico:

Having seen off the populist challenge to the European Union in France’s elections, the young centrist comes to his first EU summit with a list of demands: He will ask EU leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday and Friday for three measures to bolster trade defenses and crowd out competition from China.

It will be Macron’s attempt to deliver on his campaign promise to defend citizens against the impact of globalization, while continuing to address some of the root causes of populist nationalism not only in France, but across Europe.

“The president led a campaign that was very engaged towards Europe by insisting on the theme of a Europe that protects,” said one French official. “But Europe can only be supported and understood if it brings a certain protection which is felt as such, which is visible and concrete, to our fellow citizens.”

Here’s Frits Bolkestein, a former European Commissioner, lamenting the reemergence of an old French priority: neutering liberalized EU takeover regulations, supposedly on the basis of “vital strategic interests.”

This Colbertist instinct — that French wealth should serve the French state — runs deep among its elite. But it is also catching on elsewhere. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni have voiced their support for Macron’s plans to introduce steps that would screen takeovers on “national security grounds.” By keeping a company’s shares outside the immediate grasp of any interested buyer, these countries could block or at least significantly slow down takeover processes and stand in the way of a truly open market.

Cross-border takeovers remain an important means of maintaining competitiveness among European companies, as well as the health of the EU’s free-market system. When stronger, better-managed business entities are allowed to acquire floundering, inefficient companies, corporate accountability remains robust. Capital, fresh ideas, and new management are allowed to circulate among the economies of Western Europe such that underperforming personnel are forced to answer for declining share prices.

Macron has a large mandate on paper to push through far-reaching reforms in France, but the relatively low turnout and the threat of strikes and protests from unions opposed to what he campaigned on appear to be pushing him towards protectionism. Whether these are merely gestures meant for domestic consumption or strong demands of the EU he is unwilling to back down from remains to be seen. The fact remains: the French will remain French, despite many good reasons for making a change.

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Arab Factionalism in Gaza Electric Deal

Last week, at the request of the Palestinian Authority, Israel shut off electricity supplies to the Gaza strip following an end to fuel shipments from the PA in April that power Gaza’s lone power plant. Now, that flow of fuel has resumed, the lights are back on, and a potential crisis averted thanks to what a week ago would have looked like a surprising deal. As the AP reports:

The sole power plant in electricity-starved Gaza Strip sputtered back to life Thursday after receiving fuel from Egypt — a shipment that resulted from a surprising alliance between bitter ex-rivals, including the territory’s ruling Hamas and an exiled former Gaza strongman.

Egypt’s shipment of 1 million liters of fuel undercut a high-stakes campaign by Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who is trying to weaken Hamas by gradually reducing the flow of electricity to the territory he lost to the militants in 2007. [….]

… [Other] factors appear to play a role, including Egyptian support for Mohammed Dahlan, an exiled Palestinian official with presidential ambitions. The former Gaza strongman had bitterly fought Hamas a decade ago, became Abbas’ top aide after losing that battle and then fell out with the Palestinian leader in 2010.

Dahlan helped persuade Egypt to send the badly needed fuel to Gaza, in exchange for Hamas allowing him to broaden his political presence in Gaza, according to officials involved in the negotiations.

This should serve as a reminder, if anyone still needs it, that the “Gaza blockade” that embittered BDS types keep blaming Israel for is anything but an Israeli responsibility. Gaza has a border with Egypt; Israel has no control of this border. No “blockade” of Gaza is possible without it being a joint Arab-Israeli undertaking.

Also implicated in the “blockade” is Abbas. He wants Gaza back, and thinks this is a good moment to go for it. It is the PA, not Israel, which is cutting off the funding for fuel in Gaza. Again, it is the Palestinians and the Egyptians who are responsible for what is happening or not happening in Gaza in terms of trade and economics. Abbas is squeezing Hamas because of a general feeling that Hamas is weakening.

Hamas seems to agree with the diagnosis that its grip on Gaza is weakening—or at least that it could use some shoring up. It has been making concessions to Mohammed Dahlan, the PA-affiliated leader whom Hamas ousted from Gaza more than a decade ago. In return, Dahlan—whom the Egyptians quite like—has been using his influence to broker some kind of agreement between Hamas, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and Egypt’s Sisi, who hates the Muslim Brotherhood.

Abbas presumably hates all this, as the detente between Egypt, Dahlan, and Hamas significantly reduces his chances at one of the few concrete accomplishments to which he can still aspire: reuniting the splintered Palestinian nation.

He probably won’t succeed, as all Palestinian factions these days are too weak and too poor to avoid leaning on foreign protectors and paymasters. None of these foreign forces—whether Western, Saudi and UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Iran, Egypt—want a strong and united Palestinian movement that can call its own shots and control its own destiny.

It also shows how thin the bonds between the Saudi-UAE coalition on the one hand and Egypt on the other really are. Egypt appears to be breaking from the Saudi-UAE united approach on Qatar and its ally Hamas. This partly reflects Egypt’s concerns about internal security and the Sinai. Egyptians may believe that they can have a better chance at stopping terrorist attacks and MB subversion by doing a deal now with a Hamas that it is weak and worried. Long term, they would like to install a pro-Egyptian ruler in Gaza. It also reflects Egypt’s unwillingness to subordinate itself to the leadership of any other Arab state; Egyptians still feel that they are and ought to be at the center of Arab politics, and that Egypt is an independent actor whom no one can take for granted.

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This Criticism of GOP Health Reform Is Revealing

The emerging Democratic attack against the GOP’s health bill, unveiled today in the Senate goes something like this: This is not a healthcare bill but a reverse class warfare bill—a tax cut for the rich financed by Medicaid cuts for the poor.

This argument is powerful because there is a good deal of truth to it. The Senate bill would cut taxes deeply, including by repealing an Obamacare tax on investment income for high-earners. The bill remains revenue neutral in part by cutting Medicaid spending in ways that conservatives say would make the program work better, but that would also leave more low-income people without coverage.

This critique may be enough to kill the bill. And maybe the bill deserves to be killed. But it also inadvertently highlights Obamacare’s underperformance.

When Obamacare was pitched, its champions promised a sweeping, root-and-branch reform that would foster competition and bring down premiums and change the way insurance was purchased and care was delivered. David Brooks, writing last year, recalled the heady mood perfectly: “The supporters argued that the system would help Americans purchase health insurance through carefully regulated state exchanges. President Obama envisioned a day when consumers could shop for health coverage ‘the same way you’d shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon.'”

As it turns out, the bill has fallen far short of those expectations. The individual mandate isn’t working as well as hoped; the insurance exchanges are under pressure; and insurers are leaving the market in many states.

Meanwhile, more than half (estimates vary) of the coverage expansion under Obamacare was achieved due to the Medicaid expansion. Once expected to be just one part of a wide-ranging law, the Medicaid expansion has been the main vehicle by which the Affordable Care Act provided coverage to people who couldn’t afford it.

This is a major achievement, to be sure. People who got access to Medicaid are better off than they were before. But the ACA wasn’t supposed to simply be a welfare program that taxed the rich to give free healthcare to the poor. It was billed as something much bigger than that—a total overhaul of the healthcare system that would bring down premiums for the middle class.

So the Democratic critique of the law—”you’re just cutting taxes on the rich and paying for it by cutting Medicaid”—has a corollary: Obamacare just raised taxes on the rich to pay for a Medicaid expansion. For some Obamacare partisans, that doesn’t matter—the point was just to expand coverage for low-income people. But that amounts to an admission that the law has turned out to simply be a moderate-sized welfare program, not the sweeping technocratic overhaul that was promised.

America’s healthcare mess, decades in the making, stems from the fact that care is too expensive no matter who pays for it. The debate over Obamacare is about how much care should be subsidized by the federal government. But neither the law, nor this effort at repeal, will do much to arrest the underlying cost growth that makes the issue so brutally contentious and polarizing.

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The Pension Treadmill Is Accelerating—And Governments Can’t Possibly Keep Up

The U.S. public sector pension system is hurtling toward a catastrophic and potentially unavoidable collapse. That’s the implication of two recently-released reports assessing the fiscal soundness of the state-run retirement plans.

The first report shows that even as state and local governments shovel more and more money in, they are falling further and further behind as liabilities balloon exponentially. From Pensions & Investments:

Contributions to public pension plans have increased in recent years, but their unfunded liabilities have increased more, according to an analysis by the Society of Actuaries released Wednesday.

Between 2006 and 2014, employer contributions increased 76%, up to $85 billion in 2014 from $48 billion, and employee contributions increased 30%, to $37 billion from $28 billion. Total unfunded liabilities increased 150% to $1 trillion in 2014 from $400 billion in 2006, and the plans studied were 73% funded by the end of 2014.

The second report shows that even a white-hot bull market through 2020 would not be enough to start closing the pension hole. Most likely, unfunded liabilities (already in the trillions of dollars) will surge. And in the case of a stock market collapse, all bets are off. Also from P&I:

U.S. public pension funds’ unfunded pension liabilities are expected to rise through 2020, even under positive investment return scenarios, said a report Tuesday from Moody’s Investors Service. […]

Under the first scenario with a cumulative investment return of 25% for 2017-’19, aggregate net pension liabilities for the 56 plans fell by just 1%. Under the second scenario with a cumulative investment return of 19% for 2017-2019, net pension liabilities rose by 15%. Under the third scenario with a 7.2% return in 2017, -5% return in 2018 and zero return in 2019, net pension liabilities rose by 59%.

How did we get here? Powerful public sector unions have been able to lobby legislatures to increase future benefits—an easy way for politicians to win political capital without spending any money in the present. Many state and local governments have hidden the extent of their true liabilities using distorted discount rates and other types of accounting sleight-of-hand. In some states, courts have essentially made pension benefits untouchable once they have been promised.

The impact of this looming crisis will have wide-reaching impact going far beyond public employees’ retirement plans. They could force major cutbacks in vital state functions like infrastructure, education and healthcare, and produce vicious political fights over resources that bring governments to a standstill—as is already happening in Illinois. A wave of Puerto Rico-style bankruptcies could have a major impact on business investment and produce a vicious downward spiral in the states and localities affected.

While policymakers should continue pushing to reform public sector pensions—in particular, moving new employees to defined-contribution 401(k)-style plans so misgovernance on this scale can’t happen again—the stark numbers in the reports from the ASA and from Moody’s show that we need to be focusing on mitigation as well. How will we respond to this unfolding crisis so that ordinary people who rely on government services are not forced to bear all of the pain?

Though it threatens to hobble state and local governments in the not-so-distant future, the pension situation remains under-addressed by the Washington political class. They should start paying attention. The last thing we need is another national crisis that catches the U.S. government off guard.

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Sympathy for the Kremlin

“So I’ve created a counter-myth to the official one—is that so bad?” – Oliver Stone on JFK, 1991

“We’ll improvise,” Oliver Stone tells Vladimir Putin at the outset of his latest film, directing the Russian president to his seat at a circular table. “No rules about this.” The Russian President takes his seat, smiles, and affirms that directive with an affable gesture and a simple English “yes.” Thus begins The Putin Interviews, a four-hour documentary series filmed between 2015 and 2017, that purports to offer a rare, honest, and intimate look into what makes the Russian leader tick.

Of course, anyone familiar with either Oliver Stone or Vladimir Putin will understand that there are rules about this. Stone has made his career with films that traffic in conspiracy theories and cast a skeptical eye on American claims to exceptionalism and moral authority. Vladimir Putin, perpetual critic of Western hypocrisy, is both a consistent mouthpiece for those views and a compelling prism through which to explore them. Interviewer and subject here reinforce each other’s priors; Stone may not know a word of Russian, but for much of The Putin Interviews he and Putin are effectively speaking the same language.

Like Stone’s other forays into documentary filmmaking, The Putin Interviews is best understood not as journalism but as advocacy. In this case, Stone is advocating for Putin—or at least his idea of him. Stone’s Putin is a strong and successful (if reluctant) leader, a principled defender of Russian interests, a rational actor, a staunch enemy of Western imperialism.

Above all, Stone’s Putin is misunderstood: the victim of a Western political and media establishment that has unfairly “insulted and abused” him, as the director put it to Stephen Colbert. Given Stone’s fawning treatment of Putin, some critics have argued that he has effectively launched the Russian president’s re-election campaign. But The Putin Interviews more closely resembles a kind of re-education campaign, with Stone showing the unwashed Western masses the error of their ways.

Needless to say, Stone’s four-hour hagiography is full of convenient omissions and credulous assumptions. It offers a few tantalizing glimpses of Putin’s daily life, a few telling insights into his thinking, and a few memorably off-color jokes. In many ways, though, The Putin Interviews tells us less about its ostensible subject than it does about his admirers. It’s a self-portrait of Stone as much as a direct one of Putin—but the picture it paints is hardly flattering.

The basic rules that Stone follows in The Putin Interviews are all established within the first episode. First, there is the tendency to cede the floor to Putin, allowing the Russian leader to spin his own version of events with minimal pushback or follow-up. That begins innocently enough, as Putin describes his journey from a hardscrabble Leningrad childhood to the seat of power in Moscow. It’s a sympathetic account, allowing Putin to speak with unfeigned sympathy about the social “catastrophe” visited upon the Russian people in the 1990s, while positioning himself as the reluctant leader who assumed the heavy burden of leading the country. It’s also a convenient version of events, which allows Putin to claim maximum credit for turning Russia around while distancing himself from Yeltsin and the chaos of the 1990s. Stone seems curiously disinterested in pressing Putin for details about other formative events, whether his famous stand against anti-KGB rioters in Dresden or less flattering episodes like his mismanagement of a “resources-for-food” scheme during his time in Leningrad government. Instead, Stone sets the tone early on by allowing Putin to pick and choose whatever elements of his narrative he prefers to emphasize.

The second rule Stone follows is quite simple: give Putin credit. “You’re credited with many fine things,” he prompts Putin early on, before listing a litany of accomplishments (Russia’s rising GDP, falling poverty rates, and so on) selected to demonstrate his positive track record. Stone is not wrong to mention these economic achievements; they are as much a part of Putin’s legacy as anything else, and constitute a key source of his support. But Stone offers them up so that Putin can nod in affirmation, and then pile on with other dubious achievements. Putin credits himself with establishing the rule of law in Russia, for instance, and bringing oligarchs to heel by “[differentiating] money from power”—a real howler for anyone familiar with the kleptocratic underpinnings of the Russian state.

As a third rule, Stone acknowledges criticisms of Russia when he must—but always so that Putin can excuse or deflect them. When he asks Putin to set the record straight about Russia’s restrictions on gay rights, privacy, and media freedom, Stone accepts Putin’s explanations at face value, and then goes even further to carry water for him. At one point, for instance, Putin claims that he has liberalized the party registration process so that the Russian electorate actually has too many options, and that opposition figures have simply failed to offer a meaningful alternative. Stone then cuts to clownish footage of pocket opposition figures like Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as if to prove Putin’s point: Russia’s democracy is fair and free, but only United Russia has a serious agenda.

Indeed, Stone always appears determined to make Putin appear the most reasonable man in the room. He therefore tends to ask leading, loaded questions that stake out a maximalist position and allow Putin to claim a sensible middle ground. When Putin initially declines an invitation to speculate about American grand strategy, for instance, Stone offers his own take:

Stone: Well, I can state it for you and you can argue with me. I could say I think, or many people think the U.S. strategy right now is to destroy the Russian economy, bring it back to 1990s levels, and change the leadership of Russia, make a new ally out of Russia for the United States and basically dominate Russia as it once did and perhaps they feel they did not go far enough and take your nuclear arsenal away from Russia.

Putin: This train of thought and policy is quite possible. If that is the case, then I believe this is an erroneous policy […] such a view of relations with Russia is not oriented towards the future. People who believe like that, they do not see 25 to 50 years to the future. And if they had a look, then they would probably go about building relations with Russia in a different frame.

The point of these exchanges is always to make Putin appear the rational actor, responding to an aggressive and unreasonable West. And that is linked with the most fundamental rule guiding The Putin Interviews: whenever possible, blame the United States. The documentary sometimes does this explicitly, with Stone and Putin predictably blaming NATO expansion or U.S.-backed foreign coups for the current strain in relations. But the film’s most insidious accusations are its implicit ones. When Putin alleges that the CIA supported Chechen terrorists to destabilize Russia, for instance, Stone cuts to somber footage of the 2002 Moscow theater siege and the 2004 Beslan school siege, with title cards listing the casualty counts for each attack. Stone does not elaborate on either event, nor does he directly state that the U.S. is to blame for those deaths—but the editing makes his insinuation clear enough.

It is moments like these that show Stone at his most conspiratorial, suggesting that the true aim of The Putin Interviews is less to understand Russia than to lob a tired leftist critique at the United States. Stone’s conspiracy-mongering is always selective; he shows no curiosity about conspiracies that could cast Putin in a bad light (like those mysterious 1999 apartment bombings, for instance), but whenever there is a chance to imply covert and nefarious wrongdoing by Washington, he takes the bait.

In the past, Stone has justified his films’ dubious historical assertions as representing a “counter-myth” to official U.S. narratives, which he subjects to extreme scrutiny. But that often leaves Stone in the position of accepting foreign governments’ narratives at face value.

For all of Stone’s ideological blinders, The Putin Interviews is not without its insights. Even in this carefully curated portrait, Putin betrays some revelatory tensions in his worldview. He decries NATO as a sovereignty-sucking monstrosity (“NATO has no allies, it has only vassals”) even as he complains that the U.S. establishment would never allow Russia to join. He asserts the principle of national sovereignty as the basic foundation of international relations, while conceding that some countries are more sovereign than others (“There are just a handful of countries who can really wield their sovereignty.”) He wrestles with how to talk about Edward Snowden, praising him as a courageous defector in one breath and calling him “foolhardy” for publicly leaking in the next. None of these contradictions in Putin’s thinking are new, but they do find a compelling expression in the film.

The film is also a showcase for Putin’s mordant wit. The Russian president sits stone-faced for much of the film (even when he watches Dr. Strangelove), but he displays flashes of humor where his personal charisma shines through. When asked about John McCain, perhaps the Senate’s leading Russia hawk, Putin likens him to Rome’s Cato the Elder, constantly declaring that Carthage must be destroyed. And he drily trolls the outgoing Obama administration, saying that Joe Biden’s receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom reminded him of the Soviet Politburo dolling out medals to each other. “I thought that was very funny, to be honest,” Putin says. “I understood that the administration had run out of time to take any serious decisions.”

Putin reserves no such mockery for Donald Trump. Predictably enough, Putin praises Trump’s political instincts and desire for better relations with Russia, while categorically denying Russian interference in the 2016 elections. But those strained denials, too, offer an offhand insight. Putin insists that he would never interfere in the U.S. elections, in part because American elections produce only cosmetic change anyway. “Bureaucracy is what rules the world,” he tells Stone; American presidents change but the policy does not. That rationalization for Russia’s noninterference is hardly convincing, but it does suggest that Putin expects no profound change out of Trump. Putin’s discussion of Trump suggests not a puppet master gloating over his success, but a man caught slightly off guard by Trump’s victory—the Kremlin never thought he would be allowed to win—and only mildly hopeful that he can overcome the bureaucratic obstacles to a reset.

Moments like these do shed a light on Putin’s thinking, which is Stone’s ostensible purpose and certainly a worthy goal. The United States does suffer from a lack of understanding about Putin, after all, and never more so than now. On the anti-Putin Left, we have a host of newly minted Russia “experts” proliferating on Twitter, casting their nets wherever they can for evidence that Donald Trump is a Putin puppet. On the anti-Putin Right, there is the usual assortment of hawks who are fond of declaring Putin a bully, a tyrant, a KGB thug: all accurate assertions, to some degree, but ones that tend to shut down the debate around Russia rather than illuminate it. And on both sides, there is a common and mistaken assumption that Washington faces a Putin problem, not a Russia problem: as if the continued disagreements between the United States and Russia are the personal province of one man, and will not outlast his time in office.

A film that complicated those narratives—a film that sought to understand the sources of Putin’s thinking, while still preserving a healthy skepticism about his self-serving narratives—would be a worthy enterprise. But Stone is not up to the task. And indeed, by not providing the all-important context, he leaves uninformed viewers with a completely distorted view of Russia’s authoritarian ruler.

A telling moment comes late in the final episode, as Stone excitedly visits a series of Communist monuments in Moscow: first the grave of Jack Reed, the prominent American Communist, and then the tomb of Lenin himself. At Reed’s grave, Stone explains that Reed was considered a hero by many for his idealistic devotion to pacifism and workers’ rights; at Lenin’s, he speaks in hushed and almost reverent tones. In both places, you get a sense of Stone’s personal investment in the old lost cause of Russia. He comes across as a fellow traveller who may believe that Putin—the leader of a kleptocratic capitalist state—is somehow the natural heir to that tradition.

To be fair, it is easy to imagine a Right-leaning admirer of Putin similarly clinging to illusions about Putin by embracing different elements of his persona: his public displays of pious Orthodoxy, for example, or his defense of “traditional values.” But the truth remains that Putin is not particularly committed to any positive ideology. He is a savvy opportunist and a smooth operative, a skilled political actor able to assume different guises for different foreign audiences, whether the far left or the populist right. But he is not a man of consistent principle, nor a leader to be much admired. Stone’s attempt to cast him as such tells us more about the projections of Putin’s admirers than the man himself.

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Integration Policy Flopping in Germany

Berlin has admitted that it is barely making headway in integrating its refugee population, the Financial Times reports:

Up to three quarters of Germany’s refugees will still be unemployed in five years’ time, according to a government minister, in a stark admission of the challenges the country faces in integrating its huge migrant population.

Aydan Özoğuz, commissioner for immigration, refugees and integration, told the Financial Times that only a quarter to a third of the newcomers would enter the labour market over the next five years, and “for many others we will need up to 10”. […]

“There has been a shift in perceptions,” Ms Özoğuz told the FT. Many of the first Syrian refugees to arrive in Germany were doctors and engineers, but they were succeeded by “many, many more who lacked skills”.

The labor statistics offer a particularly bleak picture. The employment rate for refugees in Germany stands at just 17%, and the number of those looking for work has increased from 322,000 to 484,000 since last July—an increase of 50%:

With Angela Merkel seemingly cruising to an easy victory in September’s elections, the worst political blowback from her open-door migrant policy may be behind her for now. But the hard economic truths suggest that Germany will be coping with the consequences of her willkommenskultur for many years to come—and as of now, the system is abjectly failing to handle the challenge.

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Too PC to Call Ethnic Conflict “Ethnic”

The New York Times is still doing its best to avoid writing clearly when covering Africa. Its write-up yesterday, describing terrible ethnic violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a case in point:

The top United Nations human rights official [Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein] on Tuesday accused a militia linked to the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo of atrocities, including mass killings, pregnant women cut open and infants hacked with machetes.

The Bana Mura militia “have in the past two months shot dead, hacked or burned to death and mutilated hundreds of villagers, as well as destroying entire villages” in the central Kasaï region, the official, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The piece is replete with vague language that obscures more than it explains: “the situation,” “escalating violence,” “the conflict convulsing the Kasaï region.” And the Times‘ readers are never enlightened as to who the “Bana Mura” militia really are.

How did other outlets fare with the same material? Al Jazeera ran a piece titled “UN accuses rivals in DR Congo of fuelling ethnic hatred”, emphasizing a different and more important part of Al Hussein’s report:

“I am appalled by the creation and arming of a militia, the Bana Mura, allegedly to support the authorities in fighting the Kamwina Nsapu (rebels),” Zeid told the UN Human Rights Council.

Over the past two months, the armed group had carried out “horrific attacks against civilians from the Luba and Lulua ethnic groups”, destroying entire villages and shooting, burning and hacking to death villagers, among them babies and young children.

Since last September, the armed followers of tribal chief Kamwina Nsapu – who was killed a month earlier – have rebelled against the authority of the central government.

Why does the Gray Lady (with the exception of veteran Africa reporter Jeffrey Gettleman) so consistently understate the importance of ethnicity in African conflicts? We cannot know for sure, but here’s a hunch: maybe it’s just not polite—not politically correct—to talk about ethnic conflict because it conjures up images of ‘primitive peoples’ blindly killing each other.

The paradox is that by avoiding mentioning the unspeakable, the Times’ context-less reporting contributes to the very same kind of lazy thinking it is presumably trying to shield its readers from. Careful study of ethnic conflict reveals its nuanced dynamics. (There are, after all, entire academic journals dedicated to the study of ethnicity and politics.) For a newspaper now marketing itself as the last great defender of objective truth, the failure to acknowledge the relationship between ethnicity and violence is only the latest example of hypocrisy.

But can these complex dynamics be explained given the space constraints of the contemporary newspaper? Certainly. For its part, the WSJ also underlined the worrying ethnic dimension of the killings in Kasaï, adding to it a detailed and much-needed analysis of how the commodity crash and patronage network dynamics are shaping politics and violence in the DRC:

At the same time, the drop in prices for oil, copper and cobalt—which account for 90% of Congo’s exports—cut into government spending on social services and other payments that usually flow to local chiefdoms. The commodities crash also diminished the chiefs’ revenue from illicit mining and logging, as well as informal levies they collect from local traders.

“A deteriorating economy has fueled resentment toward Mr. Kabila’s regime, especially among traditional chiefs,” said Adeline van Houtte, Africa analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

To conceal the ethnic dimension of this conflict is to do a disservice to just about everyone—to readers trying to stay informed of events far afield, to activists trying to draw attention to a neglected region, to policymakers evaluating potential responses, and not least of all to the more than 3,000 people of Kasaï who have been singled out and killed because of their ethnic identity. To borrow the language of the social justice left, the NYT’s colorblind approach to ethnicity amounts to nothing less than erasure.

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Finally, a Biofuel to Get Excited About

Most biofuels news is bad—our current national program incentivizes the production and consumption of corn-based ethanol that somehow manages to increase food prices, increase gas prices, hurt American refineries, and hurt the environment. It’s a boondoggle, plain and simple.

But not all biofuels are terrible. You can distill ethanol from cellulosic crops, an option that’s both green and beneficial to farmers. Scientists have also been working hard to figure out how to use algae to create oil, and as the FT reports, a team from ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics just made an algal breakthrough:

Scientists at Synthetic Genomics, the biotech company founded by genomics pioneer Craig Venter, used advanced genetic engineering to double the oil content of their algal strain from 20 to 40 per cent, without inhibiting its growth. The findings are published in Nature Biotechnology on Monday. […]

Previous attempts to boost the oil concentration in algae — an important step in biofuel production — failed because the cells stopped growing when they were overloaded with lipid. The new genetic process maintains growth until 40 per cent of the biomass consists of lipid, an industrially useful level.

Did you catch that last part? An industrially useful level. That’s a huge step forward for what to this point has been a fringe technology under the biofuels umbrella. It’s significant, too, that this technological breakthrough is coming to us courtesy of genetic engineering. Once again we’re seeing the enormous potential of GM technology made manifest.

This is also more egg on the face of the “peak oil” crowd, who just a decade ago were chiding the world for its dependence on the energy source and confidently telling us that the sky was ready to fall. It hasn’t. And technologies like hydraulic fracturing, horizontal well drilling, and maybe even algal biofuels look capable of thriving for decades to come.

In the near future, though, the sooner we see corn-based ethanol discarded as the awful fuel choice that it is, the better. Perhaps algae can help it on its way.

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Xi’s Purge Sets Sights on Universities

Xi Jinping’s long-running purge has a new target in its sights: administrators at Chinese universities. The Financial Times:

“Ideological and political work is relatively weak, and the implementation of ideological systems is not strong enough,” said a report by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), criticising the party committees at each university and urging them to “take responsibility” for their shortcomings.

The assessment comes after teams of CCDI inspectors were dispatched to 29 universities earlier this year with the remit of “upholding the party’s leadership and party-building” and to root out “political bias”.

Part of the story here has to do with ideology. Xi publicly stressed in December that universities ought to be transformed into “strongholds of the party’s leadership”, and that Marxist orthodoxy ought to be strictly enforced. His statement, however, was widely taken as merely a reiteration of longstanding Party policy. Professors deemed to be spreading “Western values” have in several cases been silenced or removed in the past few years.

The fact that the CCDI, an anti-corruption body, is involved is a notable development, and suggests that this is less about ideas and more about loyalty—rooting out “political bias” in China’s universities has traditionally been the role of the Education Ministry. More than likely, then, this a power play by CCDI’s fearsome director Wang Qishan, Xi’s chief hatchet man, ahead of this autumn’s 19th Party Congress, where, the FT notes, we might well see Wang become the country’s new Premier. Wang has built up a prodigious list of enemies over the past few years. He can’t afford to not be more aggressive now.

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Pentagon Praises India in Afghanistan

The Pentagon has praised India as Afghanistan’s most faithful friend in the region, The Times of India reports:

India is Afghanistan‘s most reliable regional partner, the Pentagon has said in its latest Afghan report, the first under the Trump administration.

“India is providing significant training opportunities for Afghan officers and enlisted personnel. Approximately 130 Afghans travel to India each year to attend various military academy and commissioning programs,” it said in the six- monthly report to the US Congress.

“India is Afghanistan’s most reliable regional partner and the largest contributor of development assistance in the region, including civil development projects such as the Afghanistan-India Friendship Dam and the Afghan parliament building,” the Pentagon added.

Statements like these don’t usually come out of nowhere. Some context from Reuters earlier this week:

President Donald Trump’s administration is exploring hardening its approach toward Pakistan to crack down on Pakistan-based militants launching attacks in neighboring Afghanistan, two U.S. officials tell Reuters.

Potential Trump administration responses being discussed include expanding U.S. drone strikes, redirecting or withholding some aid to Pakistan and perhaps eventually downgrading Pakistan’s status as a major non-NATO ally, the two officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Look for things to get dicey as the region rebalances. As the U.S. Defense Intelligence Director testified last month, Pakistan will not tolerate India’s growing influence in Afghanistan and would rather destabilize the country than let Kabul cozy up to New Delhi. And as Uncle Sam grows more distant, Islamabad is sure to try to deepen its relationship with China. If Pakistan officially confirms the long-rumored establishment of a permanent Chinese base in Gwadar, look for pulses to quicken in Delhi as well.

Interesting times.

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